Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole
Futurism
Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole
A grand jury made the exceedingly rare decision to decline federal charges against an Ohio man accused of tearing down a Flock ALPR.
Jury Nullification is like the secret code of the US justice system.That’s why most of the people that work for the system absolutely despised the whole idea.
The us justice system is already fucked up and makes a joke of the term justice.
I mean, if it wasn’t packaged up in the American flag and pax americana, your nations actions would be that of clearly terrorist nation.
I don’t expect the taliban to have a working legal/justice system either.
This is really true. Pick a blog, video, or what ever lawyer you want making comment on the state of the federal justice system right now. It’s a mess and a shit show.
The 5-4 and Strict Scrutiny podcasts are fucking infuriating to listen to. The hypocrisy and self contradiction in Supreme Court and some circuit court decisions is insane.
It has been for a long time
It is so much worse now. Look at the former career employees that abandoned ship. Or the current head prosecutor.
It is so much worse.
Though this happened with the grand jury, which only needs a majority vote (sometimes a supermajority). It means a lot of people chose to nullify or didn’t trust the prosecution to give a fair trial.
Any justice system actually. Common law especially though.
Common Law is better than codified law. That’s the only reason we have juries and don’t just let judges decide the fate of the accused. Can you imagine, in this country, judges the sole decider of your case?
The reason that the UK and US have had such cuntish law enforcement is not because of english common law. It should be noted the UK cancelled some of common law’s basic tenants, like the right to a jury trial, not only afforded to indictable offenses, any crime with less than 3 years imprisonment is decided by their famously haughty aristocratic judges now.
They actually passed that??
Yeah, first the Tories maybe 5-7 years back or so cancelled juries for crimes with less than 1 year imprisonment, then Starmer’s labour party just upped it to all crimes less than 3 years.
In the late 19th century they also passed a law where if they thought jury tampering was going to happen they could just do it with a judge, idk how often they have used it though.
Pretty sure it’s not active yet though, still being discussed?
I was trying to verify where this was, the guardian and reuters in like 2024 or so left me with the impression it was passed, but a cursory search after your inquiry did not find the detail. I had to leave town here, Hopefully I can find out tomorrow morning.
It sounded like they made the new rule but it’s not in force yet from my cursory search that led me to some lackluster guardian article.
Quick edit, the news did say it was passed I am sure. I have been wrong before though on stuff like this.
Jury vs judge trial is a separate axis from common law vs civil law. You can have common law (where decisions of higher courts are deemed binding on lower courts) even if lower courts are all judge-only trials. You can have trials decided by a jury where every decision made by a judge is ultimately answerable only to written statute, with prior judicial judgments being at best persuasive.
It can cut both ways though, it was used in the South in favor of racists.
I’ll keep that in mind next time we have some influence over policy.
I’m sure the GOP will figure out how to get rid of it soon enough
They would have to get rid of juries altogether.
Given that our current legal system was created as a direct reaction to star chambers and baked into the constitution, they have an uphill climb, at the least.
They don’t care about the constitution man.
Trump will do an executive order, it’ll get tonthe Supreme.Cpurt, and they will just kneelnon it for “time to think about it.” And that will be it, its “the law” now.
Why do people keep pretending the Supreme Court always agrees with Trump. They’ve struck him down often and seem to be taking a very strict constitutionalist view. Most recent example would be the whole birthright citizenship ruling.
Obviously this court is terrible for many reasons, they gutted the voting rights act and ended Roe. But they’re not getting rid of juries their record is clear there
The Supreme Court isn’t going to curb its own power for Trump. Even with three of them permanently hanging off his dick, they’ve shut down literally everything he’s done that could affect them personally.
they will give him a secret trial, or disappear to one of thier concentration camps in the south, which would mostly be texas, and the msms will never ever report on a citizen getting detained, at least not a white one.
No, they will do what they do everywhere else and stack the decks so that nullification is only ever used for “their people”.
In a sense, its the system functioning as it should. If you have a healthy democratic society with good principals, juries should acquit people for things that may be crimes but are perfectly reasonable and justified.
Why should law enfocement and prosecuters get to decide which laws to enforce and which not to, but jurrors cant?
Unless the laws on the books were short and perfect, there is always going to be enforcement choices, and it seems to me the jury nulification option is no worse than other selective enforcement. It lets guilty people go free, sure, but it sometimes stops unjust incarceration.
It’s a great mechanism for “peer review” especially in the sense that ethics and legality are often entirely different things.
What is Jury Nullification?
Basically a jury can legally decide to nullify by declaring “not guilty” regardless of the facts or the judge’s instructions, etc. This is why even mentioning jury nullification during a trial can really upset the judge and the prosecution. It is supposed to be something every jury is aware of, but that is usually not actually the case.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I want to know who the two cunts that down voted this are…
Flock employees.
Sometimes you vote wrong by accident and don’t notice.
What does it say? It looks like a blank comment to me. Maybe that’s why they down voted it? I’m viewing it on Thunder, and I guess there are flaws.
It’s an image. Is Thunder text only?
It looks like it doesn’t show embedded images that don’t originate from the Lenny server.
How do you know which client someone is using?
Only if they say, so far as I know.
Ah lol, I somehow missed that. I thought Lemmy was storing client information with comments.
It is this gif:
media1.tenor.com/…/ron-swanson-parks-and-rec.gif
Probably because he was with some of them trading Pokémon cards at the time, couldn’t have been him, everyone has a doppelgänger
Come to think of it, how accurately can facial recognition tell apart to people who look very similar?
Zero. Zero accurately. They don’t even talk about it, because they don’t care. The arbitrary cruelty is a bonus feature.
I bet the manufacturers of these surveillance systems leave a wink wink way for authorities to slip a name in their systems as a hit for something too.
Facial recognition has an inherent bias as well, or at least it did not too long ago. It was mostly trained on white people, so it’s accuracy with non whites was really bad. I’m sure the training data is far more robust now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean better.
This has happened
It can’t.
Also, and I have no idea what race this person is, but facial recognition tents to be even worse when it comes to minority groups, especially black people. Because its more often created and tested by white or asian dudes.
Which has absolutely terrible implications when you consider it gets used for things like Flock, for crimes, which already have a racism problem skewed against black people.
Not at all, but that’s the court’s problem I guess.
If you have a reasonable group of people like a friends and family group, you can get machine learning to be very accurate (with odd exceptions like babies and twins). But what is 99% accurate for 50 people will almost universally give false positives when searching a group of 50 million faces. The math just doesnt work for them.
By recognizing faces. Obviously.
Nah you are confused he was with me feeding the homeless
You must be mistaken, he was helping me load up my truck with mulch for the community garden. He even bought me lunch afterwards.
He was actually at my place, we were cooking for the homeless. Terrorism actually, with lentils and curry. So which one would the state rather prosecute?
What does terrorism curry taste like?
Bombastic.
Its just normal curry but you feed it to people who had to sleep outside.
That whole “a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” was when you could pull your jurors out of a citizen pool that didn’t walk in already believing you were lying through your fucking teeth.
But then they pulled the mask off, and let us all see how they are using the courts for vindictive prosecution and political harassment.
Looks like the ham sammich days are ending, lol.
I just heard about a prosecutor that didn’t get all of his indictments and then sent the jurors that voted against him home and replaced them. That and other stuff, they aren’t even pretending to follow the rules, they think everything is more openly corrupt than it is yet.
But anyway, the courts threw out like 200 indictments because this prick prosecutor didn’t think he had to follow the rules/didn’t know or care what the rules were.
The Department of Justice has been doing stuff like that a lot since the Trump administration, to the point that they lost presumption of regularity (the assumption in advance that state actors are being honest and following the rules in good faith). There were so many prosecutions that were clearly directed by the White House and were vindictive persecutions of political enemies that the judges just stopped believing anyone from DoJ.
It didn’t help that all the honest prosecutors in DoJ resigned when they were ordered to do something unlawful, resulting in massive brain drain. All the rehires are unskilled if not incompetent, and sometimes they issue legal statements that sound like a Truth Social post.
Holy shit. That’s some arrogance right there, thinking no one would ever know or find out. Grand juries are secret, but they’re not THAT secret.
You nailed it.
IIRC that instance was so egregious the lawyer that did it’s boss intervened and scrapped the entire grand jury to start over.
They never pretended much. You’re just looking at it now.
I called this decline into insanity and fascism back in the mid 90s. Also nailed global warming in 2000 or so, and called the nsa’s bullshit years before snowden to name a few.
I am only right on the bad predictions, my good predictions are a shitshow.
I didn’t get it that far back. I blame Pokémon. Except global warming. I was just kind of raised with it as a fact.
whats funny is I help found an environmental group in college and did a lot of recycling things and it took the gore movie for it to get on my radar.
Succks he made a movie instead of non-insane environmental policy.
yeah I keep imagining how different things would be if we had 8 years of gore instead of bush in the first 8 years of the millenium. we got screwed on that hanging chad.
We got screwed by a court decision instead of an election
It sucks he resigned an election he won because the courts decided to disfaithfully charge their duty. The now lionized by the dem establishment Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the deciding vote on giving the vote to the loser of the election by the way.
Fuck Al Gore. Voters decide elections, not courts, he should have stood up and taken it, but our dem leaders, especially for president, are chosen because they are weak kneed sell outs. Biden was just the progression where every cycle it gets worse respective of party.
You should bet on stuff you don’t like. Then if you win it’s like an insurance payout. Your prediction skills will make money for you, and you might create incentives for other people to reduce bad things.
Yeah that is good advice, hedge the bad times coming. I haven’t patronized these betting sites because the one I liked, predictit, run by a couple universities, one in new zealand, was outlawed by the US while they gave the franchise to for profit companies. I am salty on this.
It was outlawed a while back, can’t remember if it was the prez’ first term or Biden’s. I think the latter actually, biden was a fucking cunt.
It all started when someone threw the sandwich at ice.
They always bring up that quote about being able to indict a ham sandwich but they never specify the charges.
Also doesn’t apply if that’s ham as in cop.
Exactly, twas not merely a ham sandwich, but a decadent smorgasbord of temptation, as charged.
Well back in the 90’s a ham sandwich did choke to death some super obese woman celebrity. I don’t know her name I only know of it secondhand because I don’t watch that kind of entertainment television crap that I think she was.
You may be thinking of Mama Cass in the late 70s, who died of a heart attack but was popularly cited as choking on a ham sandwich?
That is it, momma cass.
So the ham sandwich was framed? Those bastards! I think I did hear that before but didn’t retain the information well.
I think you heard a fat joke and confused it with a fact.
You think that because you have a defective logic. I comminicated what I was told, I did not endorse it as triue.
You will never achieve literary greatness with your logic here pal.
You’re the one who took what you heard as fact (you made a statement that said something happened that didn’t with no indication that it was fiction or urban legend) without checking but okay, stranger on the internet. A dumbass forum comment like yours doesn’t merit a literary analysis, get over yourself.
The lack of self-awareness is hilarious, so thanks for the chuckle. Some serious malding loser energy to take an offhand joke so damn personally.
I didn’t read past your first sentence, because you already discredited yourself.
I communicated what I was told, I quantified a rumour, I did not qualify it. The fact that you don’t know the difference means you are not worth responding to because you use defective reasoning.
For once, the law was working.
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I imagine all cases prosecuted for destruction of networked Flock and Axios cameras are going to struggle to get through a jury. It’s a clear privacy violation and everyone knows it.
While you are right, there are almost no laws in the US that protect privacy. Short of being in your own home with the blinds down, there is next to nothing working in your favor. The assumption is that you’re in “public” or clear view of the public, thusly, screw you.
Your pool? Clear view from the road. That douchenozzle with a drone, probably not breaking the law when he takes a video flying over. “Oh, I was looking at my own roof” or some bullshit.
There should be privacy laws. The world has changed so much, but most laws are stuck in the stone age and now sold to the highest bidder who actively monetizes the complete lack of privacy laws.
In the US, you can look up TONS of details about anyone’s house. From the sale price, the tax history, tons of details about it and even photos of the inside. In what normal world does that make sense?! Your employer sells your salary data to ADP who then sells it to any number of others. What the actual fuck?! Nobody asked for this, it’s opt-out only but the opt out expires. I did it a few years ago, and it’s back on again.
If privacy were not important, then there should not be bathroom doors.
Wait wait… explain this ADP thing. How do I opt out?
Companies are trying to prevent people switching jobs to get raises by creating a central database of all employees and their salaries. That way, when you try to find a new job they can pull up your salary history and not accidentally give you a 40% bump when your desperation factor clearly shows you’ll settle for 10%.
I assume adp is just one of those companies doing this, and you opt out by not participating in the economy.
Plus blacklist, which happens accidentally with ai recruiters now
Go here: employees.theworknumber.com. Create account log in, surf through myriad of pages to find the way to opt out. It’s in there somewhere.
We have legal precedent that the police cannot use GPS trackers. A similar case was opened for the APLs in traditional speed cameras, but they were determined to be constitutional since you have no expectation of privacy on a public road and a camera can’t be used to track you like GPS. The networked APLs accomplish the same result as GPS trackers just without technically using a GPS tracker.
Is this not what an ankle monitor is?
But if you are in public and i follow you nonstop, keeping track of where and when you go…well you would say i was stalking you. Why is it bad for me but ok for a network of cameras.
We need 1 good lawyer to argue this case.
There are plenty of privacy laws, but the catch is that you have to make an effort to create privacy. Putting your blinds down creates privacy. Building a roof over your pool and walls around your yard create privacy. There is just no expectation of privacy in public, and technically anything that can be seen from public is “in plain view”. Protecting your privacy is not a function of the state unless you had an expectation of privacy through explicit disclaimer or honest effort.
This definition of “privacy” just makes it an addon of property rights, rather than a human right.
How truly American.
Just adding here, what is clear to all of us as Coaster indicated, that aggregate privacy and anonymity are what is really at stake here.
Sure, I’m in public and just walking around. I don’t have a right to privacy in those instants. Some jerk with a camera is within their rights to capture my image.
The other aspect of the laws, though, is that even a few years ago, that image was of an anonymous person. The photographer didn’t know who I was and couldn’t find out without asking me and if a cop wanted that picture they had to request it from the taker. Now, though, that image can be shuffled off to a giant datacenter to be processed and potentially figure out who I am, coordinating the time, place, clothing, activities, nearby people, and myriad other details and the tech companies have no problem handing it over that information without any of the humans ever knowing.
I think the simplest solution is that any LEO querying a company’s data about a private entity should require a warrant or subpoena. Data sharing agreements between companies and governments should be illegal.
The longer solution is that collecting and retaining this information “for business purposes” needs to be more heavily regulated. The current definitions of PII are out of date. PII should include things like location, likeness, mood, etc, and the history of those things. Look at what Walmart and others are doing with dynamic pricing, for example.
Exactly. So juries will make their own decisions.
Looks like Flock is back on the menu!
…boys!
And girls!
And my axe!
You know what, the people are alright.
Of course they didn’t indict him.
I was having ribs with this dude. Couldn’t have been him.
I believe the grand jury system is working as intended
For once yes. Grand Juries at the time of the Constitution were a safeguard against arbitrary and unjust prosecutions. The rulers have since changed what a grand jury is to make it the opposite, a tool of the prosecutors.
Luckily the prosecutors for this administration are so arrogant and incompetent they haven’t been able to maintain that facade of trustworthiness which the masses still afford to dickheads in suits with position.
Of course the judges are so bad it often doesn’t matter, especially when it’s in a shitholy jurisdiction, like those protesters at the Texas Ice that got kangarooed by their dipshit hanging judge down there under preposterous, blatantly unconstitutional charges, cancelling the 1st amendment.
Curiously, when I was drafted into jury duty here in California, we were shown a video that said something like The people are society’s last line of defense against bad law.
I took it personally, figuring it was my duty to not enforce any law that was unjust or protect any institution that was cruel. But I didn’t get selected.
i was in JD last sept, it was a burglary case about a AA person, almost everyone used a variation of NULLIFICATION to get out of it. Also in cali, they try very hard to keep these people around. the only ones that excuse quickly is the one that already had professional knowledge of the law(lawyer from germany), and a lady who was in a case where she was a victm.
Things have improved! Once I was rejected because I answered truthfully about whether I’d always vote for the law as written.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda been Luigi too
That case is way too political. Common sense has gone out of the window there.
Every time they ever move him around every cop in the area always seems to need to be involved. It’s not like he’s accused of slaughtering an entire precinct with nothing but his bare hands or anything, supposedly he shot one person with a gun that he obviously no longer has. I’m really not sure why they treat him as Hannibal lecter.
To convince the public he's guilty. It's one of the ways they skew the narrative.
Remember in the movie "SWAT" where that mobster guy who entered the country illegally to kill the one guy and then offered money to get him out? That's Hollywood doing their part to put the idea in our minds that this kind of thing is warranted.
People do want to help Luigi and that scares the shit out of them too. They expected people's moral compass to make them side with the CEO he shot. But that's not what happened. The general public is very much pro Luigi.
The comic of all the insurance claims denied and labeling it “legal murder” does a good job explaining why the moral compass is with Luigi. Everyone knows a friend or friend of a friend who has been denied a claim that could help.
The people leading the push for his prosecution are very much out of touch with that reality though. Cops and prosecutors have some of the best healthcare in the country.
Because he has the audacity to kill a capitalist, instead of a fellow poor
This, they don’t see you and me as people. We’re lucky to be considered cattle in their views.
The farther you move up the ladder, the less they see us as human. “Human resources” says it all. We’re just another resource to them, like coal, or water, or electricity. An input in their factory to achieve a product output. They don’t care what happens to us while there, as long as we keep producing. They don’t care what happens to us when we leave, as long as we don’t sue them, or smear their name.
Zero fucking empathy for anyone but themselves, not even their own kids. They know what they’re doing is terrible, that’s why they’re building bunkers. They fully expect us to turn on them at some point in the near future. That’s why they surround themselves with boot-licking bodyguards.
Good point. If I’m not mistaken, court juries can still pass a jury nullification for Luigi Mangione, right?
He entered a guilty plea.
I’m honestly surprised he did that. If I was him I would not trust the state to uphold its end of the plea bargain. I’d much rather take my chances with a jury.
He didn’t get a bargain either.
It was to get the NY charges dropped. Which is stupid as fuck, double jeopardy should not be allowed
I already thought Luigi was a fall guy, but that kinda sealed the deal for me.
There is zero information on why they didn’t indict, so I’m not celebrating until we find out why.
It could be that the software isn’t accurate enough to be evidence on its own. Similar to how identifying someone in a lineup is notoriously inaccurate. They may be able to use it for probably cause in a search warrant, but without other supporting evidence, they may not have a case.
The article mentions felony charges - it could also or instead be that it was too high a bar (pun intended) to indict when it should have been a misdemeanor vandalism charge.
Yeah this has been the case for grand juries I’ve been a part of. The DA is not interested in prosecution if the charges are misdemeanors only.
If that’s the case, being thrown out by a grand jury is basically being thrown out for being insufficient for probable cause. But that’s again why I want the details to know if it’s some sort of technicality or some major flaw to the argument.
I agree. It would be nice to know why, but I’d imagine we’ll never know. We can just speculate.
It is a grand jury. That is the practice round for a trial. The prosecutor goes over the evidence and explains what argument they are going to make in court without the defendent or their lawyer present to argue against it. The role of a grand jury is to pump the prosecutor up and say “You got this. I would totally believe you if I was on a real jury.”
The fact that in this case, the grand jury said “That is stupid. You have no argument. Just let the guy walk,” means that either the prosecutor is an incompetent idiot who did not understand what evidence he was presenting or the jury thought that no crime had been committed.
It’s not a practice round for a trial. It is the first safety check of “Is there even plausibly enough evidence to go to trial?” or more specifically “If everything the prosecutin is claiming is true, is that enough for a trial?” which is why it nearly always is.
I highly disagree with your assessment, and it sounds like you don’t really understand the courts. Now, you may be simplifying, and if so, then my ‘accusation’ is off-base, so don’t take it too seriously.
I’m no legal expert, but I’ve followed enough to see how 99% of legal representations on television (i.e. court dramas) are laughably inaccurate.
So I go back to my point - like when see a real judge on a youtube video of a courtroom proceeding and they do a probable cause hearing - basically similar principles to a grand jury - it matters why they throw something out. It matters a lot. Is it a technicality that they can overcome and resubmit the case, or is it a fundamental flaw?
Saw my first one knocked over yesterday. Cheered.
That man did us a favor
FTFY
Nah, destroying those mass surveillance cameras is a public duty. One I don’t have the cojones to do, but a public duty nonetheless.
These are on public land without adequate public consultation… therefore they are “litter” and anyone removing them is doing a public service.
facts
Why not both?
Fair. Point conceited.
We need to talk a LOT about Jury Nullification in this country. They are trying to weaponize the courts, and ultimately it doesn’t come down to the system, or the judges, it comes down the Citizens simply saying NO.
Trials put the power into the hands of the Citizens, and we should exploit that power against our Opressors. WE will decide who gets punished in this country.
Someone just got banned for life from jury duty.
I looked online, and I’m kind of disappointed that there aren’t any nearby where I live. I want to do my part!
Holy shit. Over 40 have gone up within 4 miles of my house in the last 3 months.
Then they are either being discussed by your local government to be installes or they already subscribed to one of the equivelant compeditors. This shit is everywhere.
Is there a specific site that lists them?
maps.deflock.org
I just used “have I been flocked”
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FlockHopper is a great way to see where they’re going up around you. You know, for avoiding them and NOTHING ELSE.
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I think FlockHopper pulls from deflock and it also does GPS routing as well. Honestly avoiding flock adds maybe a minute extra to my commute so it’s worth it.
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the idea of a grand jury is also crazy, basically they just decide wether to charge someone or not, not even a regular jury to determine if they are guilty or not. i heard getting called to GJ is worst than regular, because it can last alot longer.
It’s completely different from a trial jury though. They usually only meet once or twice a week. Sometimes a couple times a month.
some people cant afford that commitment. especially since jury duty barely pays a paltry for being summoned. only government workers, retired folks can afford the time off.
Requiring a grand jury for a case of vandalism is ridiculous in and of itself.
You do realize that they sought felony charges, right? Any charge like that absolutely should require a grand jury and would be ridiculous not to.
Shoplifting is a felony charge.
This is the sort of thing Grand Juries were originally created for. To curb the abuse of power that always comes with the position of prosecutor.
It’s just too bad more people don’t understand that their role on a Grand Jury is to be adversarial to the one trying to bring the case.
Grand jury duty is worse because you have to be there for weeks at a time potentially. Whereas in regular jury duty you are assigned to a trial, which usually lasts 1-2 days if they don’t settle or plead out. The only time a trial lasts weeks is if it’s an absolutely gigantic case over millions of dollars or a murder case.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters Please read this
On the subject of Flock…
These are “autonomous deputies?” But uh, where is every single warrant for every plate they catch on a car? The plate may be public property, but the vehicle is not. Sure, maybe a bank has a lien due to a loan, but it’s still private property. This is some serious 4th Amendment violation because I have seen 0 warrant for any of these unwarranted searches.
They dont need a warrant for a plate that is visible from public. If your car was locked up in a garage, that would be a different story. Taking your car out in public is the same as taking your face out in public legally speaking.
You what really works? Having a law on the books that plainly states the “the driver must be ticketed”. And NOT the vehicle. So unless they pull the car over and hand the ticket to whoever is driving, they can’t use cameras for that purpose.
Cool, so anyone who can afford a self driving car is immune to tickets and traffic citations. Very bourgeois.
Ticketing a car is a good practice to avoid police interaction, which is the real danger in this country. The burden of proof still applies in court, so even if you did get a “phantom” ticket, they still have to prove you were in control of the vehicle at the time. I recently got a red light camera ticket on a rental thrown out because I showed i turned in the vehicle 4 hours before the time of the infraction. Goddamn Hertz tried to throw me under the bus. Always keep your receipts.
You were lucky. What would have you done if you couldn’t prove you no longer had possession of the car? If they had ticketed the driver directly, none of that could have happened to you. There would have been nothing for you to prove.This is why the state I live in has had that law requiring ticketing the actual driver and not the car decades before traffic cameras were even a thing.
And since there are no self driving cars that can be commonly found on the roads today, that’s a silly idea. And IF that time ever comes, someone is still going to need to be liable for that self driving car as it goes down the road. That software is going to be so locked down it must follow all laws without exception. Because the company will hold the liability.
I literally say “save your receipts” at the end of my post and you come back with “well what if you couldn’t prove it?”
Thats what court is for.
Are you saying we should implicitly trust what a cop says just because they happened to be around to write a ticket? What makes an officers testimony more reliable than a photograph or video? In my state, cops arent even allowed to pull people over for minor traffic infractions anymore because they cant seem to stop targeting black and brown people. Do you think that’s somehow better than a speed camera or red light cam that doesnt care if the person driving is white or not?
Court is time consuming and expensive. You lose a day’s wages, you get probably get fined anyway, and you may also need to pay a lawyer and court costs. So you assume everyone can afford that? White or Black?
It must be nice to have that extra money.
That really needs to change also. That made sense back when it was just recording something in public that a random officer could have seen, but it’s no longer the same thing. No police force could have such large scale comprehensive surveillance and recording based on what an officer could have seen in public .
The fact that you could even have an officer overstep his authority to stalk someone one nationwide for personal reasons, is not just a failure of privacy safeguards, but proof that large scale surveillance is not the same as “what any random officer could have seen”
There needs to be a threshold, beyond which a warrant is required
You are correct in theory. In reality, its messy.
The courts suppose that a theoretical officer could be at any public place at any time for various reasons, and they are correct. Anything viewable from a public space is subject to plain view doctrine.
Your problem is that you say the scope of the actual surveillance available is disproportionate to the reality of what officers could feasibly see in the same timeframe. You are basically arguing that a continuous surveillance of public spaces constitutes an overbroad search.
The problem is that courts have set no upper limit on passive public observation. I cant think of any precedent where “the cops look this way too much” has ever been set as a valid cause of action against a government interest. Your best bet would be trying to argue that its prejudicial, but it’d be hard to proceed when there is surveillance on everyone pretty equally.
My problem with it is mostly that its a private network. If these cameras and services are being paid for with public funds, then the images they capture should be available for public use. Thats a whole new nightmare all on its own, but thats kind of the technohorror future we are building towards. Anyone being able to track down anyone at any time is a scary thought. But that’s what you get when you build a giant spy network with public money. The public gets access according to the law.
Clearly the private ownership is part of this dystopia. Even if we were to place limits or safeguards on this surveillance, it probably won’t apply to purchasing private databases
Not at all how that works.
Then how do plain view doctrine and warrantless searches work then?
By people like you who normalize it, that’s how.
Also, these cameras are subject to angular resolution. The “AI” is hallucinating if it “sees every plate” because some are blurry nonsense, even to a human.
You heard em boys, not a crime. Get after it!
damn things should never have been built in the first place
But they were. And now the resolution needs to not only include removing the cameras but also the freedoms from those who have been blatantly violating the rights of millions of Americans. From the oligarchs, the senators involved, the council members who got paid off, to every single employee in between that chose to go to work for these companies knowing full well their objective.
100% Ohio will go after him now.
Book’em Danno.
That’s… not how this works